[Nova]

"If you want audiophile sound quality but still want all your music stored on a hard drive instead of shiny little discs, you have a few options. You could pick up an iPod and matching iPod Hi-Fi. (Well, probably not. But Steve did say he was an audiophile, didn't he?) Or you could spring for an Olive Opus, a $3,000 CD player with a built-in 400GB hard drive, four 24-bit DACs and built-in Ethernet and WiFi for streaming (Olive's earlier players, the Symphony and Musica, had smaller hard drives). According to Olive, the Opus uses 8X oversampling and a 352.8 kHz sample rate to produce true lossless audio with no noise. The Opus can also burn CDs from your music, and Olive will even rip all of your CDs for you. And, yes, Steve, you can transfer music from the Opus to an iPod. " From Engadget

It basically does everything but it doesn't seem worth the cost ($3000) considering that you could buy a 1TB of storage, a professional sound card and all the other components for a new computer and still spend less than half of that. So I would hope that at this price, the sound quality of this unit is amazing. Has anyone herd the sound quality of previous Olive products? Would having such an insane oversampling rate really create any noticable improvements?

 

[Jon L]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nova "If you want audiophile sound quality but still want all your music stored on a hard drive instead of shiny little discs, you have a few options. You could pick up an iPod and matching iPod Hi-Fi. (Well, probably not. But Steve did say he was an audiophile, didn't he?) Or you could spring for an Olive Opus, a $3,000 CD player with a built-in 400GB hard drive, four 24-bit DACs and built-in Ethernet and WiFi for streaming (Olive's earlier players, the Symphony and Musica, had smaller hard drives). According to Olive, the Opus uses 8X oversampling and a 352.8 kHz sample rate to produce true lossless audio with no noise. The Opus can also burn CDs from your music, and Olive will even rip all of your CDs for you. And, yes, Steve, you can transfer music from the Opus to an iPod. " From Engadget It basically does everything but it doesn't seem worth the cost ($3000) considering that you could buy a 1TB of storage, a professional sound card and all the other components for a new computer and still spend less than half of that. So I would hope that at this price, the sound quality of this unit is amazing. Has anyone herd the sound quality of previous Olive products? Would having such an insane oversampling rate really create any noticable improvements?

It's always amusing to see a bunch of old technology enumerated in such a fashion as product promotion.

352.8kHz is simply 44.1kHz x8 oversampling. This is nothing new or complicated, and most DAC's in the 90's used this 8x oversampling technology, which is basicaly the same thing as synchronous upsampling to 352.8kHz.

Oddly enough, the much more inferior (IMHO) asynchronous upsampling became the "next new thing" and replaced 8x oversampling.

There's nothing listed that Olive Opus can do that cannot be done by a PC. If you're comfortable with building a PC with audio in mind, you can do it for much cheaper, but if you are not a computer person, nothing wrong with buying something like Olive...

 

[InSides]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nova considering that you could buy a 1TB of storage, a professional sound card and all the other components for a new computer and still spend less than half of that.

Well, not exactly half of that, but still less than $3000. As many other products before this one, I should assume its primary target are not the DIY-inclined people on this board, but rather the ones looking for a one-stop completed solution.

There has been some talk over at Audio Asylum and Audio Circle as I seem to remember Vinnie Rossi [of Red Wine Audio] talking about evaluating one of the earlier Olive products. Here are the associated threads:

Computer Audio Asylum : Anyone hear the Olive Musica?

Audio Circle : Multichannel Audio and the Digital Domain

Not that I would really buy it, though - with the latest price drops, you could get a fanless Hush, a terabyte NAS, a choice of sound cards [as well as optional outboard DAC's] and still budget out below its price mark.